Intron Health, a health tech company that provides clinical speech recognition for over 200 accents spoken in developing countries, has raised Ksh. 208 million (USD 1.6 million) in a pre-seed funding round. The round was led by Microtraction, with participation from Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, and Baker Bridge Capital.
The investment also saw contributions from angel investors from global companies including Google, CLEAR Global, NYU, and Optum. With this funding, Intron Health will deepen its research efforts, strengthen cloud-native and on-prem capabilities, and expand distribution. The company will also bolster its team by recruiting tech talent to support product development and market expansion, driving continued progress and breaking further technological barriers.
In recent years, voice technology has rapidly advanced globally and plays a pivotal role in various industries like automating call centre operations, generating social media content and biometric verification. Productivity tools such as clinical automatic speech recognition (ASR) are ubiquitous in developed markets. However, with over 3,000 of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages and dialects in Africa, many African and minority languages and accents remain excluded from global speech advancements.
In his bid to digitize healthcare, Intron Founder, Tobi Olatunji, quickly recognized data entry was a massive bottleneck to electronic medical record adoption. Heavy patient traffic meant thousands of keystrokes per day, increasing documentation time and patient wait time, with doctors sometimes spending over six hours a day on paperwork. The significant additional workload made digitization impractical for already overworked clinicians.
To combat these inefficiencies, Intron developed Africa’s first clinical speech recognition platform, which boasts up to 92% accuracy rate on medical terminology with heavy accents. This platform helps doctors across Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and most recently Uganda complete documentation seven times faster, significantly accelerating the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and reducing the administrative burden.
Speaking on the round, Tobi Olatunji, Founder and CEO of Intron Health stated, “Having worked as a doctor in Nigeria, I have experienced first-hand the pain points with trying to deliver quality healthcare amidst increasing patient numbers. We are excited about the adoption and growth we’ve seen over the past year, which shows we are addressing a significant need and providing a well overdue solution to a critical problem in the global south. We are not only improving efficiency but also enhancing health outcomes and positively impacting hospital finances. With the backing of prominent global investors who bring deep knowledge and expertise, we are looking forward to our next phase of growth.”